Women Entrepreneurs in India: Where Do They Stand?

The paper gives a holistic picture of the women entrepreneurship in India and its gender differentials by using various national-level data. It aims to analyse the condition of overall women employment, operational and economic characteristics, access to credit and other infrastructural facilities and entrepreneurial activity of the women-owned enterprises. The study reveals that most of the women are engaged in self-financed, small own account enterprises, without any hired workers, and are operating from within the household premises, few even without having a fixed location. These, along with the lack of access to basic infrastructural facilities, signify women entrepreneurship as necessity-driven and not opportunity-led. It also notes the persistence presence of religious and cultural norms in determining women's participation as entrepreneurs. In addition, the paper aims to study the determinants of the women entrepreneurship in India by using a logistic regression model. The model establishes more chance of engagement of women entrepreneurs in informal sector home-based work and the enterprises with less than six workers. The model also reveals the increasing chance of women entrepreneurship with increasing general education and establishes the need for formal vocational training. At the end, the study proposes to look at women's entrepreneurship from the macroeconomic understanding of women's employment and work and identify policies to ensure that women entrepreneurship does not remain only as distress-driven employment, but become opportunity-led.